This village doctor read and cherished his scanty library, and nourished his son upon Virgil and Horace, Dante and Tasso, and two works of history whose titles are significant—Rollin's “Rome,” and Thiers's “History of the French Revolution.” The perusal of Thiers and Rollin, added to conversations overheard in which the father proclaimed his own liberal principles, fired the boy with a passion for republican government, a passion which he translated into action by organizing republic after little republic with his brothers and their young companions—a republic with archons, with tribunes, with consuls, it mattered little which, he says, so long as each was inaugurated with a revolution. With undying fidelity to national ideality, Carducci looked forward to the building up of a healthy nation, “una robusta prole,” redeemed to new industry, to new thought, to the old ideals, purified and made new by justice and liberty. Whenever these efforts aspire beyond mere vers de société, the outcome is almost always a lifeless literary exercise, such as the mythological poems of Leconte de Lisle or of Théodore de Banville. In the marmoreal ode ‘Sul' Adda,’ for instance, there is an impressive reverie over departed conquerors not unworthy of Omar Khayyam; there is no throb of human passion as in Browning's ‘Love among the Ruins.’. He was born in 1836, in an obscure borghetto called Val di Castello, in the province of Pisa, and passed his first years in Tuscany—partly in the Maremma, partly at Montamiata in the province of Siena, and partly in Pisa and Florence. If the pagan world as compared with the Christian seemed to him as sunlight to darkness, classicism beside romanticism was as sunlight to moonlight. The poem ends on a challenging, polemical note, announcing the two prime, virile emotions that will drive his poetry, whatever its subject-matter: love and hate. Before the crisis of a world at war, reason staggers, yet believes that when, with the loss of much that men hold dear, shall come the destruction of falsehood and the ghastly mockeries that men call religion, the builders of that purer epoch shall work on the foundations of liberty and justice laid by you, great-souled and lofty-minded poets. The title of one of his poems, ‘Amore e Morte,’ might well describe the whole work of his later years, when ill-health and political embitterment had deepened his inborn pessimism. the poet's paternal grandmother, Lucia Santini, died in 1843 and was buried in Bolgheri, when Carducci was eight. Baldini, ‘“IM”’, 242, and G. C., Rime nuove, ed. In less tangible matters also than religious and political opinion, in that general outlook on life in which differences and likenesses elude classification, these men were inwardly at one with their fellow-citizens. In doing so, it will also direct attention to an important dimension of the theme central to this volume: the ambivalence of the lyric tradition which is shown to be capable of impeding renewal by stifling, under the weight of its own influence, the originality essential to the poetic process itself. Better its beginnings, therefore, Carducci states, than its end in the marble splendours of Rome governed still by the Papacy under Pius IX. …. Very few students were then studying literature at that University; Carducci, however, soon made himself known, and, as the years rolled by, the number of students of literature at “Alma Mater” greatly increased. As Getto observes, these descriptions ‘vogliono creare un clima non meramente fisico ma di sano significato morale’.32 Although such sentiments and the sculptural figures that embody them have in the past been praised by eminent critics, it is more difficult to see their appeal in our present disabused age. This is but another phase of Carducci's Satan, that robust first cousin of Lucifer, son of the morning, “forza vindice de la ragione,” (the avenging force of reason), “thought that flies, science that experiments,” the spirit of revolt against dogmatic, feudal, dynastic authority, the spirit successively of naturalism, pantheism, polytheism, art, history, science, sociology,—that brooding sculptured Satan of Antokolski that he wanted to call the nineteenth century. but the isles of Greece, the Hellas of Goethe, Schiller, Ménard, Leconte de Lisle: a soothing vision which allows the soul to forget the present in recollections of the ancient days—in fact, the first title of “Fantasia” was “Rimembranze antiche”: ancient memories. On Carducci's haunting influence on d'Annunzio, see Ivanos Ciani, ‘D'Annunzio e Carducci (o di una lunga infedelissima fedeltà)’, in Carducci poeta: Atti del Convegno Pietrasanta e Pisa, 26-28 settembre 1985 (Pisa, 1987), 215-43. Yet, while fully representing the Italian genius in many ways, Carducci was almost free from that quality in it which tends more than any other to repel the taste of northerners, the quality which the Italians themselves praise under the name of morbidezza. Indeed, this religious emotion that arose when he looked at history was to inspire the Carducci of maturity and old age. The steam-engine is a fitting symbol of Carducci's Satan, as a contrivance devised by man from his unprejudiced investigation of the laws of matter. 27 of. In “Funere mersit acerbo,” he entrusts his brother Dante, a suicide, with his little son who bore the same name and who is dead too: “It is my little boy who is knocking on your lonely door. The lines to the author of Il Mago are part of this introspective poetry: “O Severino [Ferrari], the dwelling of thy songs, the haunt of thy dreams, I know it well.” The sonnet “Francesco Petrarca,” in Levia Gravia, is an idyllic desire of the world to raise an altar to the poet of Laura “in the green darkness of the woods,” “with a nightingale singing 'mid the fronds.”. Febris, propitiated as goddess of malarial fever, was one of the earliest divinities of Rome. It may be objected that these things—patriotism, love, aversion, dislike—are feelings, not ideas. Frank Sewall (New York: Dodd Mead, 1892); A Selection from the Poems, trans. We can find one or two to shadowy ladies with classical names—Lydia or Lalage—but only one to a real woman, the lovely “Idyl of the Maremma.” This celebrates bionda Maria, strong and beautiful daughter of the fields, beloved in his youth; it is somewhat in the temper of Landor's “Fiesolan Idyl,” and so beautiful that we can only wish there were more. the Ennean maid: Persephone (Proserpina), daughter of Zeus and Demeter, was carried off by Pluto to the Underworld as she gathered flowers in the meadows of Enna in Sicily. He does not walk easily but rather lamely, and the pen which he wielded for over fifty years and for long consecutive periods now lies almost inactive. To him there is no contradiction between the ethereal platonism of the ‘Vita Nuova’ and the fiery purgation on the threshold of the Earthly Paradise; for, to the more analytic, as well as more impulsive, southern temperament, the juxtaposition of one love purely of the intellect with many loves wholly of the senses scarcely offers a problem. Carducci endows Maria with the statuesque beauty of Juno in lines of unusual (for Carduccci) sensual description (10-12). Below these highest regions, forests of pines and firs stand tall and motionless in the windless air and seem now to be of the substance of the luminous silence that has penetrated and possessed them. Swinburne, whose generous soul lived by adoration of human greatness, exalting Hugo, Landor, Mazzini, Shakespeare, Marlowe, Aurelio Saffi, Louis Blanc, saw holiness not in an anthropomorphic God of wrath and thundering vengeance but in the limitless capacity of the human mind, believing with Blake that “the worship of God is: Honoring his gifts in other men, each according to his genius and loving the greatest men best; those who envy or calumniate great men hate God; for there is no other God.”. He was a popular teacher, which brought both financial security and the opportunity to write consistently, sometimes under the pseudonym Enotrio Romano for more controversial works. The Odi Barbare are an attempt to introduce into modern lyrical poetry several of the ancient metres—‘to adapt to the divine foot of the Italian Muse the Alcaic Sapphic and Asclepiadean cothurnus,’ as the author says, following Théophile Gautier's metaphor. Giosuè Carducci Naissença 27 de julhet de 1835 Val di Castello, Toscana: N. a Decès 16 de febrièr de 1907: D. a Causa de decès Assassinat/ada per Luòc d'enterrament ... La favola breve è finita, il vero immortale è l'amor. In its final version, the vision of Maria in the cornfield begins: The changes add force and a touch of down-to-earth sensuality, with the exception of the substitution of ‘serto’ for ‘mazzo’, which takes the opposite, pastoral path that De Lollis and Russo find so jarring. Naz., II, 125). He employed his literary talents to voice these controversial opinions. Maria's precise identity, if indeed she ever existed, is manifestly of no consequence.6 But the rapprochement made with Carolina Piva has an undoubted relevance. While on the one hand he was in accord with the Classicists of the pre-Manzonian and pre-Romantic tradition, on the other hand he brought to his poetry and even to his prose the affections and the ways and the forms of a more intense Romanticism. To parallel it we must go to Turner's picture of the ‘Fighting Téméraire:’—. He might well have lived and sung under the sage and elegant Octavianus, that “present Apollo” of poets and prototype of Lorenzo de' Medici, in the Augustan age of Rome; he might have fitly consorted, a kindred soul, with Horace, Propertius, and Ovid. in contrast to the region's heroic and bloody past, the present scene is one of pastoral tranquillity. But against this sadness of the death of the earth, Carducci could set the joyous song of love: “Everything passes and nothing can die.” That prodigious “Canto di Marzo” [“March Song”], transcribes even more clearly the sentiment previously expressed in the “Canto d'Amore.” Here the art of Carducci is in its moment of grace, and this March, this spring, without any symbolical meaning, becomes naturally the myth of the eternal change and renewal of the world. Adonis: the lover of Venus, was Phoenician in origin (see below 73-6); Astarte: Phoenician goddess of fertility. Francesco Ferrucci, heroic defender of Florence in the imperial siege, was killed by the Spanish mercenaries of the Calabrian Fabrizio Maramaldo in 1530, whilst uttering the famous words ‘Tu dai a un uomo morto’ (‘You are striking down a dead man’). It will be seen that the three periods overlap each other. And he exhorts “Caro Beppe” somewhere: “Write, write—and forget this life, which is a vain thing.” Vivacity in his letter-writing is called out only by his dislikes; he says himself: “I was ever more ready to hate evil than to love good,” but the truth is rather that he enjoyed himself more in the expression of his antipathies. Shelley is welcomed to the islands of the blessed by the epic and tragic heroes and heroines, and hailed as ‘poeta del liberato mondo’; surroundings and titles alike suggest ‘Prometheus’ and ‘The Cenci,’ perhaps even ‘The Revolt of Islam,’ rather than the lyrics which are now Shelley's chief glory in his own country. Often forcefully formulated or skilfully adorned, his declarations of love remain unconvincing. For in this case, at least, the midday sun in which he stands is experienced as the destructive Gorgon. Carducci's command of meter in conjunction with his ability to descriptively evoke the atmosphere of the Adriatic Sea provides the setting for tragic adventure in “Miramar,” a piece from Barbarian Odes. The poem is addressed to Carducci's brother Dante, dead in their youth by his own hand. Word Count: 2167. As we turn to the “Alessandria” our thoughts insensibly revert to the warning Horatian Sapphics: But Carducci, although he dares to rival the “Theban Eagle,” has no cause to dread an Icarian fall. velites: Etruscan light infantry armed with javelins. 11-32. But these critics seem to have overlooked the derivation of the ode Per la morte di Napoleone Eugenio (which offers an excellent instance of romantic inspiration) from Platen's Die Wiege des Königs von Rom. In this new age of industry, Satan has conquered the Jehovah of the priests. ‘orc’, the sea monster who preyed on human flesh, especially of maidens (see Ariosto. Jan 31st, 2021 Wigmore Hall – UK. This insensibility sometimes led him to odd critical pronouncements. … At the foot of the mountains and under the shade of the oaks, as of thy streams, O Italy, so of thy songs is the fount. But Carducci's austere soul would have had little sympathy with Swinburne's “dead lute-players that in dead years had done delicious things.” Carducci's robust paganism did not include an interest in the scarlet and secret sins of Greece and the Renaissance. Book II of the Rime nuove is composed of 34 sonnets on a variety of subjects, including this piece, the second of two poems on the sonnet form, written in 1870. But it is quite evident from the “Hesperia” and the dedication of the first series of “Poems and Ballads,” when he had “fled and escaped from the rage of her reign” who was sweet to him once, that he did not consider his early loves fit company for the austere patriots, the poets, and the children to whom he gave his ripened allegiance. Avanti!”. We will give his own words on this subject taken from the preface to the third edition of his poems. He continued to study indefatigably, and from time to time published various critical essays, besides sundry poems, and an edition of Politian's works in the vulgar tongue. Cf. Avanti!” (first published in 1872), galloping horses represent Carducci and his peers, and reflect the poet's disappointment and anger in seeing that his work has had little effect in stirring a hoped for revolution. When he had completed his secondary education, he went for a year to Celle on Monte Amiata, following his father's peregrinations, but towards the end of 1853 he won a competition for a resident scholarship in the Normal School of Pisa.